As regards RawTherapee:
- It runs on Linux as well. Therefore, in the future, you can run it on this system as well
- It can be made “portable” on Windows. In short, you don’t need any “Administrator privilege” to install it.
- Lightroom in the future might force you to pay a monthly subscription. In essence, future versions might “expire” at the end if you don’t subscribe once again to Adobe services .
- RawTherapee, as any open source software, allows you to follow its development through Github [1] in case you are curious about the future.
- Since you are allowed to read the code of RawTherapee you are sure there is not “spyware” on it (yes, probably I am being a bit paranoid about this topic…)
This being said, IMHO, Lightroom is much more powerful than Rawtherapee and it is not “fair” to compare them…
For instance, you can not tether your Reflex with Rawtherapee while Lightroom allows this.
Darktable looks like a much more powerful contender IMHO…
BTW, for tethering you might want to try DigiCamControl on Windwos [2] which is open source as well…
[1] GitHub - Beep6581/RawTherapee: A powerful cross-platform raw photo processing program
[2] http://digicamcontrol.com/
- Reported bugs are fixed almost immediately, when possible.
- Feature requests are discussed, also immediately, and taken seriously; if they are doable and supported by enough users, there is a good chance they will be implemented. Lightroom has reasonable requests that are years old.
- One can discuss issues with users, developers and moderators, who all tend to be available and patient most of the time. (With Pat David, this is getting even better.)
- Many RT tools come with very detailed, geeky controls, uncommon in commercial editors.
- One can make their own fork of RawTherapee.
I would like to go the other route. What does Lightroom have that RawTherapee does not (Or for that matter, any other Linux based/FOSS product). There aren’t very many differences, but these are the big two for me.
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Shadow/Highlight control - I don’t know how they do it, but Adobe has some magic sauce with highlight/shadow adjustment. I hate to say it but, nobody else comes close.
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Brushes/gradients - This one is not high on the list for me because there’s always Gimp. But it would be helpful if there were brushes and gradients with layer modes in RawTherapee.
Maybe as a close third would be HDR creation and tone-mapping, but I have a feeling those might get added in time. Besides, there are so many options for that now, it can wait.
Having written this, I’m sticking with RawTherapee. If Lightroom was $50 with 3-5 years of upgrades, I would be all over it. But those features do not justify the cost and possible future subscription based plans.
Brushes/gradients would indeed be nice. I suspect that reconfiguring the pp3 files to support that are probably the biggest thing holding it back.
But RT DOES do tone mapping. You just need another program like HDRMerge to create the HDR image. And, having seen professionals who use Lightroom and Photoshop - they don’t use the in-built HDR in THOSE either. They use some commercial program to do the HDR and then import it into Photoshop or Lightroom. Sometimes the Unix philosophy really is best: have each tool do one thing and one thing awesomely. Then chain tools together to get your result.
Some are starting to move back to Lightroom for HDR because of the new capabilities of Lightroom. I wrote tone-mapping, but really it’s editing a 32 bit HDR. Again, this is where those shadow/highlight sliders come in with the “secret sauce”. I know RawTherapee can edit 32 bit files as well, but those shadow/highlight sliders in Lightroom are like magic. If anyone can crack the code on those, there would be no reason to even consider Lightroom.
I feel the question “What can RawTherapee do what Lightroom cannot” is a waste of time, a red herring. There’s plenty of good documentation for both programs, and there are many discussions about the merits of open-source software, so rewriting that stuff here is quite pointless, at least as a means of addressing the real issue… The real question is:
What on earth are they talking about?
I wonder if he works for one of those German municipalities that is moving away from commercial software.
As part of my job, I have created packages for lots of software.
They are used to push the software to PCs from a centralised management system (typically Microsoft SCCM), with desired configuration, without the need for a technician to visit the PC, and without the need for the end user to have admin rights, this also provides a method of tracking which software and version is installed on which PCs. Essentially, it just requires a silent installation with the ability to define any configuration options.
Adobe provide their own software that allows for creating a custom package with desired configuration for their products, which will then install silently and unattended, with license agreements accepted etc.
RT uses Inno setup to create the Windows exe installers, which provides it’s own command line switches for silent installation. Inno Setup Help
Don’t get me wrong, I love RT and it is my preferred raw photo editor, but in a corporation that already uses LR, the OP should also use LR, and not look for any old weak excuse to use RT. Great images can be made with either. As already discussed, just because RT is free (as in cost) it doesn’t make it free to manage/maintain in a corporate environment. The real efficiency saving is by using one application across the corporation. Now if the corporation didn’t already have a raw editor in use, then I would whole heartedly recommend RT for many of the reasons given above by others.
Thank you for your responses so far.
damonlynch describes perfectly the situation writing: “The system administrators in this case are demanding evidence that the cost of the time they spend on installing and keeping up-to-date RT is money well spent compared to spending the license fee on competing Adobe products.”
As Chris and damonlynch point out one reason for augmenting in RT favor is the fact that my colleagues and I are already working with RT. We developed our workflows and enjoy RTs compact and swift design. Establishing a good working routine with LR would take some time.
Ingo Weyrich suggests that CIECAM02 might be an important advantage. Indeed it
enables us to adapt luminosity and contrast and maintaining accurate colors. This appears to be an important argument.
I strongly agree with Silvio that a huge advantage of RT is that it runs under different OS. For me it is a main argument when I select software. In example I use Linux on private bases and independent mandates other colleagues use Mac OS.
As further suggested by Silivio, in the past we used RTs portable version. It would be an advantage though, if RT would be approved and maintained by the informatics department.
Jacal points out a lot of important aspects on the ease of influencing the RT quality and development. Even though this is not important for us at this time it might become very useful to us in the future.
I agree with James about the enhancement of efficiency by adapting the same software solutions in a work environment. I have to underline that in our sections were never LR users so we would not conflict on that level. We are truly interested to identify arguments to understand whether we should accept going with LR or continue to push for RT. We do have a good relationship with the IT department, so however this turns out it hopefully is fruitful for both sides.
Last but not least I was going through the RawPedia Book over the week-end - a fantastic piece of documentation. On page 14 you find : “Many raw development programs which do read the raw data apply some processing to it, such as a base tone curve, even at their most neutral settings, thereby making it impossible for a user to see the real, untouched contents of his raw photos. Adobe Lightroom is an example. Comparing RawTherapee’s real neutral image to a quasi-neutral one from these other programs will exposure the difference.”
This is truly important for us, as we use RT in the context of the documentation of cultural heritage. We normally don’t want a “fantastic” image, but an image which is representative for the real appearance.
There are a few important things Lightroom can’t do. Normally imaging programs are looking in the systems profile folder for ICC profiles. Lighteroom has it’s own enclosed folder with profiles.
- Most of the time people use a D6500 workflow (6500 Kelvin)… However, according to ISO 12647 the whitepoint of has to be D5000, the illumination of the work environment according to ISO 3664 is 5000 Kelvin with a color rendition index (CRI) of 98%.
The widely used Adobe RGB 1998 is an ancient working space from the past century. It is D6500 based, and it’s gamut is smaller then the (Kodak) Prophoto RGB or the ISO preferred eciRGB-V2-ICCv4. (More on this at http://www.eci.org). Modern printers and other output devices can deliver a bigger gamut (after conversion) than Adobe RGB 1998 can handle. Therefore is Lightroom absolute a second choice.
Why D6500? It has a commercialreason, as most of the monitors(Apple) can’t handle native whitepoints below 6000K, because they’re build with cheap components.
In RT you are in controlof the colormanagement.
- The catalogues of Lightroom are a disaster. It is better to organize your archive yourself, in folders. With the searchfunction of an operationsystem, wether it is Windows, Linux, MacOs or whatever it is possible to search for filenames and metadatda. And, if needed, you can organize your archive yourself with a simple database. Better, copy the text of the metadata of each image in the database. . Remember what happened when Apple stopped Aperture…
This is called vendor lock-in…
3 According to tests all iver the world the dcRAW based convertors give the best results. Combined with the RT-interface there’s no proprietary application that can do a better job than RT.
4Frequent updates, a worldwide community and the absence of commercial interests are the best guarantee for an independent product of high quality.
Jurriaan Nijkerk, you may or may not have ever used LR, but as is widely understood in the industry, LR does not use Adobe RGB for its internal processing. In fact the only raw converter of any kind that does use Adobe RGB for internal processing that I’m familiar with is DxO Optics Pro, which again is hardly a secret.
Moreover regardless of any program’s photo/video database, any decent program in addition writes out XMP files with all relevant metadata, including keywords, which makes your other point moot.
I haven’t used any Adobe products in a long time (probably since 2002 or so?). What do you mean by this? Is it just that they provide a few sliders that automagically apply some tone curves that look good? Or is it just more that the interface to manipulating shadows/highlights is better?
I use Darktable and to a less extent RawTherapee, and I love how both of those pieces of software have multiple ways for you to adjust these parameters. Depending upon how you like to do it and your comfort level, you can choose simple shadows/highlights sliders, the more visual levels tools, tone curves, or the gamma, gain, etc. sliders.
Recent Lightroom versions don’t just use simple curves for shadows/highlights, it’s much more sophisticated, looks like some kind of tone mapping.
P.S. horrible language in the quoted paragraph fixed: http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/The_Image_Editor_Tab
Hi Damon,
As a matter of fact I stopped using Lightroom in favor of Capture One in
2008. The reason was the incompatibility with the ISO standards like
12646 and 12647. In fact, we’re talking about colormanagement.
After seven years Capture One I turned to Raw Therapee wich is (one of)
the best RAW convertors, togehter with a group of professionals. The
base of RT is DC-raw wich is also used in UFRaw, GTKRawGallery and
other open source converters. DCRaw has unsurpassed options, like
demosaicing , denoising and sharpening end very good demosaicing options.
We already found another disadvantage of some editing and
conversionprograms, the archivemanagement, wich turned out to be a
vendor lock in. A very good eample is Apples Aperture, wich left a
enormous group of photographers with empty hands when breaking up.
Editing and converting has nothing to do with creating an archive, so I
prefer to stay independent from applications like Lightroom, amongst
others.
Furthermore, the new policy of the Commision of the European Union to
use open source software, even for big projects where suitable, is in
fact a sign on the wall.
The motivation of the EU is not about budgets, open source can be much
more expensive than proprietary software. It is about usability,
interoperability and independancy of vendors.
Interesting are the following links:
@Jur - I have edited your post to remove your email signature with your numbers, etc. I just wanted to make sure that stayed hidden in case you didn’t mean for it to be posted. If it’s ok for it to be posted, I won’t bother with it in the future (and sorry).
Hi Pat,
That’s allright with me, thanks a lot Pat. I’m brand new here, and
didn’t know how the system works, but there’s some light shining now.
You’re right. Better don’t send signatures ;). Think it is wise to stay
somewhat anonimous and I’ll look after it in the future. 
And besides, you said sorry, but I’d call it service. ;-)))
Have a nice day,
Hi Jur,
I agree the issue vendor lock-in is important for many reasons, but as a free software movement we’ve got to get our facts right too. For instance, LR uses the free software database sqlite3. There’s therefore no chance of vendor lock-in with respect to the database portion of LR, because we can use any sqlite3 tool to read it. For photographers, it means a FOSS tool can be written to convert an LR catalogue to a catalogue for another program, for example. Which is pretty cool, isn’t it!
Damon
RawTherapee uses dcraw only to decode raw files (in some cases it uses dcraw’s black and white levels and color matrices), nothing more. dcraw does not support sharpening.